By Dominic Evans
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Arab League officials arrive in Syria on Thursday to prepare for monitors overseeing an Arab peace plan, after activists said President Bashar al-Assad's forces carried out the deadliest assault in their nine-month crackdown on protests.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Syrian forces killed 111 civilians and activists were killed on Tuesday when Assad's forces surrounded them in the hills of Idlib province and unleashed two hours of bombardment and heavy gunfire.
France branded the killings an "unprecedented massacre" and the United States said Syrian authorities had "flagrantly violated their commitment to end violence."
Another 100 army deserters were either wounded or killed, making it the "bloodiest day of the Syrian revolution," the British-based Observatory's director Rami Abdulrahman said.
Events in Syria are hard to verify because authorities, who say they are battling terrorists who have killed more than 1,100 soldiers and police, have banned most independent reporting.
Tuesday's bloodshed brought the death toll reported by activists in the last 48 hours to over 200.
The main opposition Syrian National Council said "gruesome murders" were carried out, including the beheading of a local imam, and demanded international action to protect civilians.
The escalating death toll in nine months of popular unrest has raised the specter of civil war in Syria with Assad, 46, still trying to stamp out protests with troops and tanks despite international sanctions.
Idlib, a northwestern province bordering Turkey, has been a hotbed of protest during the revolt, inspired by uprisings across the Arab world this year, and has also seen increasing attacks by armed insurgents against his forces.
A politician in neighboring Lebanon said Assad was trying to crush opposition in the area before the arrival of the monitors, to prevent any de facto "buffer zone" emerging near the Turkish border.
The Observatory said rebels had damaged or destroyed 17 military vehicles in Idlib since Sunday while in the southern province of Deraa violence continued on Wednesday.
Tanks entered the town of Dael, the British-based group said, leading to clashes in which 15 security force members were killed. Six army defectors and a civilian also died and dozens of civilians were wounded, it said.
Read more:http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/22/us-syria-arabs-idUSTRE7BI0H520111222
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